We had just lent the Fiat 127 and a year later the first rover capable of carrying passengers to plow the lunar surface from Apollo 17, the last of six original US manned missions to the moon, was launched in December. 1972. Time has passed since then but now we are talking about the lunar buggy again.
Goodbye old moon buggy: here is the new lunar vehicle
The project comes from Astrolab, a Los Angeles startup founded by a veteran of space robotics who, with his prototype working in full scale, aims to convince NASA to use his vehicle. Dubbed Flexible Logistics and Exploration (Flex), this odd car is indeed as fast as NASA’s old “moon buggy”, but is designed to do so much more.
And a long demonstration in the field (more or less), that is a ride on the rugged California desert near Death Valley National Park – to which the images and video you see in these pages refer – seems to have convinced the experts of the goodness of the project.
Astrolab Flex, the car for traveling to the moon
According to Astrolab executives, the Flex rover is designed for use in NASA’s Artemis program, and is set to return humans to the moon as early as 2025 and establish a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to sending astronauts to Mars. The Flex has four wheels and the size of a car, but unlike the Apollo-era lunar buggies of the 1970s or the current generation of robotic Mars rovers adapted for specialized tasks and experiments, it is designed as a multipurpose vehicle that can be guided by astronauts or by a remote control.
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Built around a modular payload system inspired by conventional container shipping, Flex is versatile enough to be used for exploration, cargo delivery, site construction and other logistics work on the moon.
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Other aerospace companies have announced new lunar rover design concepts, but so far this is the only working prototype of this scale and capacity. And if Flex goes to the moon, this would be the first passenger-carrying rover to sail the lunar surface from Apollo 17, the last of six original US manned missions to the moon, in December 1972.
We know that the Apollo 17 lunar roving vehicle set a lunar speed record of 11 miles per hour (17.7 km / h), but the Flex can move just as quickly. Not only that: while the Apollo lunar rover carried up to two astronauts seated at the controls like in a car, the Flex’s passengers – one or two at a time – travel standing in the back, driving the vehicle with a joystick.
The rover itself, with a wheelbase similar to that of a Jeep, weighs just over 500 kilograms but has a load capacity of 1500, about the same as a light pickup. And with its fully charged solar-powered batteries, the vehicle can carry two astronauts for eight hours straight and has enough energy capacity to survive the extreme cold of a lunar night, up to 300 hours in total darkness, at the south pole of the moon.
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